Climate Risk

Mankind has achieved fast-paced technological progress in the last 100 years but, unfortunately, at the expense of nature’s preservation.  Carbon emission from such technological breakthroughs, like the introduction of vehicles, aircrafts, locomotive engines and even appliances, have contributed immensely to global warming.  It’s best to understand the science behind this natural occurrence because it is science in the end that will determine mankind’s continued existence.

The Science of Global Warming

            Billions of years in the past, the earth, its landmass, oceans and atmosphere, has experienced fluctuating temperatures, accounting for the natural changes in the seasons, life cycles of plants and animals (humans, as mammals, being just one of them), the size of ice caps, direction of ocean currents, weather patterns and other changes to our scientific world, even without the intervention of mankind.  ‘Climate has changed when the planet received more or less sunlight due to subtle shifts in its orbit, as the atmosphere or earth’s surface changed or when the sun’s energy varied.  But in the past century, humanity, as a new change agent, has influenced the earth’s climate.’ (Source: Holli Riebeek, Global Warming, Earth Observatory, June 3, 2010).  Climate change due to natural causes, unrelated to human activity, are still in play.  However, its influence has substantially diminished to explain the rapid warming being experienced and observed by scientists particularly beginning the second half of the 20^th century.  Human’s use of fossil fuel accounts for the bulk of present-day greenhouse effect.  By the end of the current century, models of climate change predict average surface temperature rising between 2 to 6 degrees Celsius.  It is believed that this would modify rainfall patterns, amplify coastal erosion, while some regions would be experiencing lengthened growing seasons, increased rates in the melting of ice caps and glaciers.  This would likewise alter the range of certain infectious diseases, the spread and mutations of which we now experience – the coronavirus being just one of them.  For comparisons, the global average surface temperature has risen at a much slower rate of 0.6 to 0.9 degrees Celsius between 1906 and 2005.

Though mankind has had the largest impact on climate after the last world war, natural changes to the earth’s atmosphere have also occurred late in the 20^th century.  In particular, two major volcanic eruptions, El Chichon in Mexico in 1982 and Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, pumped sulfur dioxide gas high into the atmosphere (reaching even the stratosphere) where gas was converted into tiny particles that lingered, reflecting sunlight and shading the earth’s surface.  As a result, temperatures across the globe dipped for two to three years.  There are many active volcanoes around the world but the carbon they emit through time, particularly during eruptions, comprise a very small share when compared to human-induced carbon emissions. (Source: Global Climate Impacts – Climate Cooling by Rose, Bluth and Gerlach)

            The earth’s temperature is drawn from the sun, with 30 percent of incoming sunlight reflected back into space and the remaining 70 percent absorbed by land, the oceans and the atmosphere. The heat these radiate (called thermal infrared radiation) travels back to the atmosphere where much is absorbed by water vapor and long-lived natural greenhouse gases.  When absorbed, microscopic water or greenhouse gas molecules turn into tiny heaters radiating heat even when the source of such heat dies out.  The energy that radiates back to earth heats the lower atmosphere and the earth’s surface, enhancing heat acquired from natural sunlight.  This kind of greenhouse effect is the one beneficial for life on earth.  One, however, cannot sufficiently emphasize the fact that over the last 250 years, mankind has artificially raised the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at an ever-increasing rate, mostly by burning fossil fuel combined with cutting down carbon-absorbing forests much faster than the forests can regenerate.  This has altered the balance of nature, some of the effects of which mankind is witnessing in just the last few decades. [Source: earthobservatory.nasa.gov – global warming]

The Environmental Consequences of Global Warming

            The continued increase in temperature have produced some of the most damaging effects of global warming, which are already becoming manifest in man’s daily lives.  Here are just a few of its worst consequences:

1. The spread of diseases, epidemics and pandemics due to alteration of biodiversity: Man witnessed, in just the latter part of the 20^th to the early 21th century, the discovery of Ebola, MERS, SARS and currently COVID 19 as global warming destroy wild animals’ habitat, forcing animals to live closer to human habitat and making it easier for animal viruses to crossover to humans. On the other hand, as some habitats become inhospitable, animal migration to other ecosystems can wreak havoc on the current balance of nature.
2. Increased heatwaves affecting agricultural production of key food staples and ocean supplies of fish catch, while the drying or flora and fauna cause more uncontrollable wildfires: Scientists have estimated that every degree Celsius rise in temperature would cause global food production to drop by nearly 10%.  Per capita food supply diminishes exponentially with the unabated rise in population.  For the oceans, one witnesses the increased frequency of red tides as El Nino occurs much more often in the past few decades.  On land, wildfires in areas of the state of California and countries like Australia are becoming a common thing to which local residents face little choice but to adjust.
3. Increased heat causing frequent droughts: Reduction in moisture for prolonged periods of time intensifies the occurrence of drought.  As the climate warms, experts estimate that drought conditions may increase by 66 percent.  Africa is already experiencing higher frequency of this phenomenon.  Some parts of Europe and Asia are likewise experiencing this but to a far lesser and, fortunately, still manageable degree.  Related to this is the process of greener areas turning into deserts (or desertification).
4. Shrinking ice shelves, glaciers and the rise of sea levels: Polar caps in Greenland and Antarctica are melting at an unprecedented rate while certain islands are slowly disappearing with the rapid loss of shoreline and tidal surges in such tourist destinations as the Solomon Islands, Maldives, Palau, Fiji, Seychelles, Cook Islands, French Polynesia and Kiribati. The disappearances of ice shelves and glaciers cuts down the earth’s capability to reflect the heat of the sun back into space.  This exposes the oceans to absorb more heat, thereby altering the balance of nature on the surface and affecting supply of nutrients to support fish, reptile and sea mammal reproduction.  One should likewise never forget that ocean phytoplankton create oxygen that rises to the atmosphere, which, together with the earth’s diminishing forest areas, supplies breathable air. (Source:  20 Key Climate Change and Global Warming Consequences by Job One for Humanity – joboneforhumanity.org)

The Economic and Social Consequences of Global Warming

            Earth’s natural environment has clearly been altered by global warming and its consequent climate change.  The environmental effects of global warming have the world scrambling to find solutions to its more immediate and close-to-home consequences, such as the COVID 19 pandemic, tsunamis, stronger weather disturbances, and its accompanying economic instabilities.  These environmental consequences have led to aggravating already existing fragile economic settings in many countries, particularly the less developed ones, leading to more social and racial injustice and poverty.  For political reasons and, way before the pandemic, we’ve already encountered mass migration and the rising number of refugees.  As early as 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have noted millions of people displaced by shoreline erosion, coastal flooding and agricultural disruptions causing migration to other locations within the same country or in neighboring ones. Opening borders to migration leads some economies to experience social unrest from the local populace, especially when economic dislocation happens to workers whose jobs are taken on by migrants.  Another visible economic effect is the increase financial costs of maintaining food sources from a dwindling efficient critical resource base, resulting in rising production costs and prices of commodities. 

People have the tendency to become complacent once they get adjusted to life under a new normal, ushered in by a permanent economic event or health crisis.  There is the usual likelihood to disregard the signs of a slowly creeping climate menace, thinking the effects of global warming are just a few more phenomenon that necessarily have to occur and for which humankind will simply, again, have to adjust and learn to live with. Costs, in its many forms, need be incurred but it should be commensurate to the carbon footprint nations create.  Some efforts are underway to reverse global warming like generating much needed energy from renewable resource (sun, wind, ocean waves), reducing use of fossil fuel and even nuclear energy, reforestation, cleaning all types of waterways, water formations and of the oceans, preserving the habitat of various types of animal species – all at efforts to bring down the earth’s temperature. But is the current magnitude of such change enough? These efforts require much funding from multilateral organizations, supported by the richest countries in the world. This is no time to think only of one’s own survival nor the ‘me first’ mentality.  As the saying goes, we’re all in this together.  If mankind will not conduct lasting and sustainable massive concrete actions to mitigate these environmental effects, which can only be done by nations with the technological capability to share this with less developed countries, earth might reach its tipping point, the point of no return, when it’s too late to reverse human extinction. 

Neriza Delfino, DBA

Contributor

February 2021 Issue